THE SATURDAY PROFILE

THE SATURDAY PROFILE; In Afghanistan, U.S. Envoy Sits In Seat of Power

By AMY WALDMAN

Published: April 17, 2004

Correction Appended

KABUL, Afghanistan—
''So what are we doing today?'' Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, asked the United States ambassador, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, as they sat in Mr. Karzai's office.

Mr. Khalilzad patiently explained that they would attend a ceremony to kick off the ''greening'' of Kabul -- the planting and seeding of 850,000 trees -- in honor of the Afghan New Year.

Mr. Karzai said he would speak off-the-cuff. Mr. Khalilzad, sounding more mentor than diplomat, approved: ''It's good you don't have a text,'' he told Mr. Karzai. ''You tend to do better.''

The genial Mr. Karzai may be Afghanistan's president, but the affable, ambitious Mr. Khalilzad often seems more like its chief executive. With his command of both details and American largesse, the Afghan-born envoy has created an alternate seat of power since his arrival on Thanksgiving.

As he shuttles between the American Embassy and the presidential palace, where Americans guard Mr. Karzai, one place seems an extension of the other.

Working closely with the Karzai government and the American military, Mr. Khalilzad ponders whether to push for the removal of uncooperative governors, where roads should be built to undercut insurgency, and how to ensure that the elements friendly to America gain ascendancy in a democratic Afghanistan. His overarching goal is to accelerate the country's rebuilding and securing, preferably on a timetable attuned to the American political cycle.

As a State Department and Pentagon official and at the Rand Corporation, he advocated pre-emptive action against so-called rogue states like Iraq. Now he is formulating -- on the ground, and on the fly -- that doctrine's previously neglected bookend: how to fill the void those governments leave behind. And as the United States struggles to get it right, policy makers in Washington are closely watching Mr. Khalilzad, an academic and policy planner.

''In many ways we're experimenting,'' Mr. Khalilzad admitted.

Until it regains sovereignty this summer, Iraq has an almost wholly American administration. Mr. Khalilzad must work with a government with its own head of state that somewhat unsteadily unifies disparate political and military factions.

Where L. Paul Bremer III has an occupation authority staffed by hundreds of Americans, Mr. Khalilzad is working with only a handful of advisers, one-tenth the number of American troops in Iraq, and this year, about one-tenth the financing.

The question is how much Mr. Khalilzad can do with so much less.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams of fewer than 100 soldiers are being deployed to provide a security presence and support reconstruction. Mr. Khalilzad has brought in a coterie of senior advisers, including a former ''change agent'' for companies like American Airlines, to provide ideas and jump-start the private sector.

''This all has to work,'' said the acting Army secretary, Les Brownlee, during a meeting with Mr. Khalilzad. ''If it doesn't, we're never going to get out of here.''

Mr. Khalilzad has less outright power than Mr. Bremer, but possibly as much influence. That is partly because America's 15,500 troops -- up from 11,000 a few months ago -- and $4.2 billion in spending since 2001 loom so large in Afghanistan, among the world's poorest, most fragile countries.

It is also because he has the ear of Mr. Karzai, whom he often sees two or three times a day, the ambassador's distinct laugh echoing from the president's inner sanctum. The two have known each other for 20 years, since Mr. Khalilzad became involved with supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen. Then an official in the Reagan administration, he helped funnel support and Stinger missiles to Islamic fundamentalists, some of whom, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, later became America's fiercest opponents.

Mr. Hekmatyar ''is your old friend,'' a former Hekmatyar commander named Sabawun, who now is advising Mr. Karzai, told Mr. Khalilzad during a brief palace encounter. Old friends become enemies, they agreed, and left it at that.

Mr. Khalilzad himself knows how compasses change. In the mid-1990's, he briefly defended the Taliban while working as a consultant for Unocal, the oil company that was then trying to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. He later became one of the Taliban's fiercest critics.

Born in Mazar-i-Sharif 53 years ago, Mr. Khalilzad, Pashtun by ethnicity, speaks Dari and Pashto. He understands and remains comfortable with the intrigues and intimacies, the informality, the talk and the tribal ties that are so much of political business here.

''You are working for two countries, the United States and Afghanistan,'' one tribal leader from Helmand Province told him.

More seasoned Afghan officials say they are clear that Zal, as Mr. Khalilzad is known, answers to the Bush administration. It dispatched him here to ensure that Afghanistan has visible progress and a successful election in advance of the American one, and to judge whether a greater infusion of money and attention now can reduce the bill to American taxpayers later.

Correction: April 22, 2004, Thursday Because of an editing error, a front-page picture caption on Saturday about the renovation of a school in Afghanistan misstated the date of the renovation work shown in the picture. It was in April 2003, not last week.